In the field of literature, spoken word is the ultimate equaliser. We are often forced to do away with what we think we know about writing and words, and trust our ears and our hearts. An outstanding piece of spoken word can wind you in the gut like a baseball bat, echo in your ears for months.
I imagine you chopping the heads off eel
catfish blossoming from the underside of fir
trees tangling with the pneumatic branches of the law
I’m not sure if I’m following a trail left by goats or on the human path as I attempt to circumvent the farmstead
Day 1: Aljazhab.
The oldest city in the world seems a likely place to find ghosts. The cab plunges into a hot, dusty turmoil of traffic, crowds and distorted calls to midday prayer.
She was unaccustomed to the light. The screen door banged behind her as she rested a burnt frying pan on the rail. A cloud of dust rose over the paddock where the men were harvesting. She shaded her eyes.
While Spielberg’s tale will have viewers exiting the cinema in a complete and total patriotic coma, Tarantino’s will have audiences walking out dripping in the blood, gore and guts of American history.
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Aaron Bady is a PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley, specialising in African and post-colonial literature. He is editor-at-large of The New Inquiry, an online cultural criticism magazine, and he also blogs there regularly via Zunguzungu. Aaron talks to us about his essay ‘Zero Dark Geronimo’, which is featured in the latest issue of Overland.
Italian thinker and media activist Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi is an important figure of today’s Leftist European theory. Having joined the Italian Communist Youth Federation in 1962 at the age of 14, he is often associated with the autonomist Anarcho-Marxist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, such as operaismo.
‘The message of Bild,’ says Enzensberger, after considering earlier Fascist publications, ‘is that no conceivable message exists any more; its sole content is the liquidisation of all content.’ The newspaper is, he says, ‘the total work of art, which liquidates all the dreams of the avant-garde movements, from the dissolution of the distinction between life and art to collective production, by fulfilling them.’
When I was a teenage boy I often skipped school on a Friday and picked up casual work at the local slaughter yard, so I could make some spending money for the weekend. While working there I saw animals treated with systematic cruelty. The distressed cries of pigs, herded into pens, waiting to have their throats cut, was a sound so shocking that it gave me nightmares.
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It is eight in the morning and with a sleep-blunted mind I absentmindedly swipe my finger over my phone. It is one-thirty and I’m on the toilet staring at the screen while the work-paid minutes tick by. It is two-thirty; my mind wanders from work and my keys tap in a familiar web address. It’s 6 pm and ignoring the subtle smell of body odour creeping through the bus air, I flick through the news feed. In a moment of clarity, I roll my eyes: what am I doing – I don’t even like Facebook.
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At the time of her appearance in the influential 2000 anthology Calyx: 30 Contemporary Australian poets, MTC Cronin had already presented herself as one of the most distinct voices among the new poets to have emerged in the 1990s. The success of her subsequent collections such as The Flower, The Thing, which won the 2005 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award in Poetry, further established her as one of main figures in the generation of poets who practiced – to use the term suggested by the poet and critic David McCooey, also in 2005 – a ‘new lyricism’.
Winning poems for the $9000 prize will be announced Friday 15 March and published in Overland’s first issue of the year.
Continue reading 'Winners of the 2012 Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize' 18
‘I really have nothing to say about poetry in general (except that mine tries to counterfeit the communication of those who communicate by silence). And these poems are mostly private letters. R.S.’